Auditing ALTER SYSTEM commands

A recent OTN Thread inspired this posting: How can we track down initialization parameter changes that someone has done with ALTER SYSTEM? One way would be to monitor the alert.log, but I think auditing should be most appropriate here. Preparing the playing field:

When you use DBCA to create an 11g Database, AUDIT_TRAIL will show as DB – I did the creation on the command line, therefore it is still NONE. When we want to see the particular ALTER SYSTEM command like in the demonstration, the value EXTENDED is additionally required.

You may notice that I was still SYS when doing the ALTER SYSTEM commands. That is important here, because they are not audited, as we can see below. If you want auditing for SYS, this posting shows how to do that.

Conclusion: ALTER SYSTEM commands can be audited very comfortable into the audit trail as long as you don’t do them as SYS. All actions of SYS can be audited also with a different approach. As always: Don’t believe it, test it :-)